A new elm stock, already fully provided with spokes, lay star-like on the grass, and the wheelwright, a thickset fellow of about forty-five years, bearded and muscular, was working away with an adze on a length of well-curved ash for the felloes, shaping with the grain of the wood.

A door or a gate serves its purpose by an application wholly foreign to itself, but it is a good and effective, or a bad and ineffective, piece of construction, independently of the posts to which it may be hung, whilst the wheel of a wheelbarrow, comprising felloes, spokes and axletree, is a piece of construction complete in itself, and independent as such of everything beyond it.